A Lightweight Authentication Protocol for Secure Communications between Resource-Limited Devices and Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The number of Resource-Limited Wireless Devices utilized in many areas of IT is growing rapidly. Some of the applications of these devices pose real security threats that can be addressed using authentication and cryptography. Many of the available authentication and encryption software solutions are predicated on the availability of ample processing power and memory. These demands cannot be met by the majority of ubiquitous computing devices, thus there is a need to apply lightweight cryptography primitives and lightweight authentication protocols that meet these demands in any application of security to devices with limited resources. A security framework is presented here that combines aspects of the Gossamer protocol and the Scalable Encryption Algorithm (SEA) to provide an implementation of inter-device security. The Gossamer Protocol is additionally used as a means of exchanging session keys for use with the SEA encryption protocol. Our system performed well with the code space requirements smaller than 600 bytes (excluding shared libraries) and a performance of 27 milliseconds per one 96-bit block of data.